Category Archives: Recovery from Heart Disease

THE EFFECTS OF
SMOKING ON THE BODY

No matter how you smoke it, tobacco is dangerous to your health and affects your entire body.

Mood Stimulation

Poor Vision

Anxiety and Irritability

Another Cold, Another Flu

Lung Cancer

Constricted Blood Vessels

High Cholesterol

Heart Disease

Stained Teeth

Smelly Hair

Diabetes Complications

Erectile Dysfunction

Early Menopause

Problems with Pregnancy

Appetite Suppressant

Coughing

COPD

Bronchitis

Too Much Clotting

Blood Cancer

Yellow Fingers

Wrinkly Skin

Bad Teeth

Infertility

Cancer Connection

Cervical Cancer

Problems for Newborns

The Effects of Smoking on the Body

Tobacco smoke is enormously harmful to your health. There’s no safe way to smoke. Replacing your cigarette with a cigar, pipe, or hookah won’t help you avoid the health risks associated with tobacco products.

Cigarettes contain about 600 ingredients. When they burn, they generate more than 7,000 chemicals, according to the American Lung Association. Many of those chemicals are poisonous and at least 69 of them can cause cancer. Many of the same ingredients are found in cigars and in tobacco used in pipes and hookahs. According to the National Cancer Institute, cigars have a higher level of carcinogens, toxins, and tar than cigarettes.

When using a hookah pipe, you’re likely to inhale more smoke than you would from a cigarette. Hookah smoke has many toxic compounds and exposes you to more carbon monoxide than cigarettes do. Hookahs also produce more secondhand smoke.

In the United States, the mortality rate for smokers is three times that of people who never smoked, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s one of the leading causes of preventable death.

Heart Of The Matter: Treating The Disease Instead Of The Person

A 56-year-old man is having lunch with his wife at a seafood restaurant just outside Boston when he develops crushing chest pain. He refuses an ambulance, so the man’s wife drives him to the ER.

What happens next says a lot about the difference that being a doctor or a patient can make in how one feels about the health care system.

First, how did the patient and his wife see the trip to the hospital?

When the man arrives in the ER, he is told to take off his shirt. He lies in the hallway, in pain, naked from the waist up. Strangers surround him. They don’t introduce themselves, and they talk over him, at each other.

Pagers ring and there’s a lot of beeping. Someone else must be really sick, he thinks; that must be why no one is paying attention.

After a few minutes, he signs some forms and finds himself being wheeled into an elevator. Masked figures enter. He feels a cool liquid flowing into his veins. The lights go out.

He wakes up hooked up to machines, uncertain what has happened. It takes several hours for the staff to find his wife, who is still waiting in the ER lobby and has no idea why her husband is in intensive care.

They are both surprised when they find out, two days later, that he’s had a heart attack. As soon as they get home, they file a complaint with the hospital about their terrible experience.

Now, how did the staff at the hospital see it?

A triage nurse greets the patient immediately upon his arrival and finds out that he has chest pain. Within three minutes, he gets an electrocardiogram that shows he is having a heart attack. The ER doctor activates the special heart attack pager, which immediately summons the emergency cardiology team.

The doctors and nurses arrive and bring the patient up to the catheterization suite. There, the attending cardiologist threads a catheter through an artery in his groin and pushes it all the way to his heart, where the doctor sees on an X-ray machine that a vessel is blocked. She inflates a small balloon in the catheter, opening the artery and restoring the flow of blood to the man’s heart.

All told, it took only 22 minutes from the time the man entered the hospital for the cardiology team to clear the blockage. The cardiology team is proud that they beat the national averagefor what they call door-to-balloon time by 42 minutes. The faster a blockage can be cleared, the better the odds are for a full recovery.

The patient gets well without complications. Two weeks later, he’s back at work and exercising again. The ER and cardiology teams consider the man’s case a resounding success.

Why then are there such different views of the same ER visit? Who’s right? The doctors who believe they delivered exemplary care, or the patient and his wife who feel he was treated badly?

As an emergency physician and advocate for my patients, I frequently hear clashing stories like these. When I review the cases, I find that the doctors and nurses are often surprised by the patient’s complaint because they did everything by the book and made no medical mistakes.

Indeed, in this case, every measure of sound medical care was met: prompt diagnosis, speedy and effective treatment and an uneventful, full recovery.

The objective measures that health care workers focus on are necessary, but they’re not enough by themselves. Every provider in this man’s case had good intentions and was working hard to respond to the medical emergency. But in their rush to open the blocked heart artery, they treated him as a disease to be cured, not a person to be cared for.

Would it have alleviated the patient’s anxiety for the doctors and nurses to introduce themselves, and to ask if he wanted his wife by his side? Would it have helped to assure him that all the activity was happening around him because everyone was trying to take care of him?

I think those simple courtesies would have made a difference.

These instructions aren’t on typical checklists for treatment of heart attack, yet they are part of caring for people as human beings. In modern medicine, we are fortunate to have incredible high-tech options available, but we must not forget the low-tech approaches that can improve communication and quality of care.

Patients and family members can also speak up when they are confused and scared. It’s possible that doctors explained what was happening, but not clearly enough.

What if the patient said he didn’t understand what was going on? What problems could have been avoided if the patient and his wife didn’t wait until after he was discharged to raise their concerns?

The two viewpoints of this ER visit end with one thing in common. Just as the providers were surprised by the patient’s complaint, the patient and his wife were taken aback when the team that I was part of presented them with their doctors’ point of view.

“We had no idea they were trying so hard,” the man said. “It’s too bad we didn’t know that at the time.”

There are a number of medical alarm options out there that target the elderly and disabled population. You should know that there are also devices that do not go directly to a monitoring center and instead directly dial 911. These are typically cellular and VoIP systems.

With cellular systems, they are not directly tied to a specific address because they are mobile and can go anywhere. This means you would have to rely on either the person using the device to know exactly where they are OR the phone giving 100% accurate GPS coordinates. This can be an issue in rural areas due to poor cellular service, and also in heavily populated areas such as an apartment complex or high rise building. Current technology only provides latitude and longitude without altitude.

If you use a device that is monitored by an alarm company they should preemptively solicit valuable information from you that would be available to pass to the 911 dispatcher should the need arise. This will allow responders to have a better location and nature of the incident if the patient is unable to talk or can’t be heard for any reasons.

Understand how your device works and make sure that they will be able to provide help when you need it most.The worst time to find out if your device will get you help is the moment when you need the help. A few questions and a little research can help in making the right decision.

Many who could benefit from attending cardiac rehabilitation didn’t have a coverable diagnosis. Yes they had significant heart disease with congestive heart failure, but were not covered to attend rehabilitation. For many years I assisted in fighting to get this coverage. It is wonderful to see it finally here. This opens access to many patients who would benefit from exercise, lifestyle intervention, education, prevention and managing of their chronic heart disease.

Causes of chest pain

Frequently people consult about experiencing chest pain. I know through training all chest pain is supposed to be referred to the emergency room for evaluation, but realistically many including myself am able recognize symptoms come from many different causes and may have different care needs. The emergency need for consultation is due the fact that many people will deny their symptoms are from a cardiac cause, delaying treatment and thus have pretty extensive heart damage or death. Evaluation thus is helpful in determining the cause. When one gets evaluated there are many different areas of anatomy where the cause may be from.

Here is a list of many differentcauses for chest pain:

the chest wall including the ribs, the muscles, and the skin;

Possibilities: A rib in poor alignment, shingles, pulled muscle, cartilage between the ribs being inflamed,

the heart including the pericardium (the sac that surrounds the heart);

Pericarditis, aortic dissection, angina, heart attack, blood clot

the aorta; aortic dissection

the esophagus; Acid reflux, narrowed esophagus, regurgitation,

the diaphragm, the flat muscle that separates the chest and abdominal cavities;

referred pain from the abdominal cavity including organs like the stomach, gallbladder, and pancreas, as well as irritation from the underside of the diaphragm due to infection, bleeding or other types of fluid.